The Great Flood

The Great Flood is the earlier apocalypse attempt that failed to destroy mankind, becoming both a historical precedent in the conspirators’ planning and the source of Metatron’s enduring comic trauma. Its failure turns a supposedly world-ending act into an embarrassing lesson about overlooked survivorship—and makes boats, rather than divine power, the obstacle that dominates Metatron’s memory.

Background and Purpose

The flood is invoked while Lucy and Metatron meet in the black void between worlds to discuss how to bring about the end of the world and begin Armageddon. Lucy presents it as a precedent: if a flood was once used as a means of annihilation, it remains available as a possible model. The proposal is practical rather than reverent, part of a conspiratorial search through different methods of ending the world.

The Attempt and Its Failure

The Great Flood did not destroy mankind. Its central reversal is therefore built into the event’s name and remembered consequence: an apparently totalizing act of destruction failed because humanity survived. The evidence does not describe the flood’s full course, but it establishes that boats preserved human life and defeated the intended extermination. Lucy recognizes the logistical problem immediately, noting that boats would be difficult to deal with, while Metatron treats them as the decisive obstruction.

Metatron’s Boat Hatred

Metatron’s reaction is shaped by the flood’s failure. Although he is a biblically accurate angel with twenty pairs of eyes, his resentment focuses not on humanity’s survival in the abstract but on the buoyant objects that made it possible. He says that, without boats, he could have completed the destruction millennia earlier, and he describes himself as hating boats. The bodily image of his crossing his middle pair of wings and sulking like the Antichrist turns cosmic frustration into a petty, recognizable grievance.

The resentment has become irrational and persistent. Even seeing a bobber can make Metatron see red, usually with a little white as well, suggesting both anger and the visual afterimage of a buoyant object. The flood therefore survives in the narrative less as a spectacle of water than as a recurring psychological and comic aftereffect: a failed historical catastrophe condensed into Metatron’s hatred of boats, bobbers, and the possibility that something as ordinary as flotation can defeat an apocalyptic design.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

When Lucy proposes another course of action, Metatron rejects the flood as something that has already demonstrated its unreliability. His conclusion is to choose a method they know will work, making the Great Flood a negative precedent in the later apocalypse conspiracy. The event supplies both a technical lesson and a character joke: destruction must account for escape routes, because grand designs can be undone by simple material objects.

The Great Flood also establishes a contrast between divine scale and practical limitation. Metatron possesses extraordinary angelic form and participates in plans involving the end of the world, yet his memory is governed by boats and life-saving buoyancy. The failed flood thus punctures apocalyptic grandeur with bureaucratic and logistical frustration. In the conspirators’ discussion, past catastrophe is not treated as sacred history but as an imperfect experiment whose weaknesses must be corrected before the next attempt.